


Everything at Once

by magikfanfic



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: AU in which Baze and Chirrut did not know each other as children, Angst and Feels, Backstory, Chirrut knew of Baze but they never met until after the temple fell, M/M, Not Canon Compliant, Pre-Rogue One, everyone is broken but working on getting better, maybe trauma triggers but nothing very explicit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-07
Updated: 2017-04-07
Packaged: 2018-10-15 21:29:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10557996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magikfanfic/pseuds/magikfanfic
Summary: Chirrut has a list of all the qualities the masters have told him that the temple golden boy possesses. The perfect initiate, guardianship attained before he had reached the age of twenty, something virtually unknown. Chirrut has never met him or even seen him, just followed his shadow down the long halls, tried to catch glimpses of him in his own face in the mirror, studied the list of qualities to see which virtues he could contain. He fails each time. It seems impossible. There is a reason he has never met this person. Chirrut is almost convinced that Baze Malbus does not exist. That he is something dreamed up by the masters to keep them excelling, always reaching for more. He wonders if he will ever know for sure.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Like the Universe](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9911864) by [EgregiousDerp](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EgregiousDerp/pseuds/EgregiousDerp). 



> This is inspired by "Like the Universe" because I kept thinking about the idea that the two of them might not have known each other growing up. This is my take on that genius idea.
> 
> Both of these characters are terribly, terribly broken and this relationship is heavily co-dependent here (warning if that's a concern), but it's definitely on its way to improving and growing out of that at the close of the story. Baze's faith is not completely gone here yet, and Chirrut can still see. There's a lot of angst in this, and at a point it had just gotten away from me so it's not what I initially set out to do, but there's some points of it that I really enjoy and hopefully you guys will as well.

Chirrut has a list of all the qualities the masters have told him that the temple golden boy possesses. The perfect initiate, guardianship attained before he had reached the age of twenty, something virtually unknown. Chirrut has never met him or even seen him, just followed his shadow down the long halls, tried to catch glimpses of him in his own face in the mirror, studied the list of qualities to see which virtues he could contain. He fails each time. It seems impossible. There is a reason he has never met this person. Chirrut is almost convinced that Baze Malbus does not exist. That he is something dreamed up by the masters to keep them excelling, always reaching for more. He wonders if he will ever know for sure.

 

The man that he meets in the bar in the months after the fall of the temple, the man with the big, dark, sad eyes, and the voice that rumbles like thunder in the distance, low and long and rich but not menacing, not really, cannot be answering to the right name because this cannot be the Baze Malbus spoken of by the masters, Baze Malbus the most devoted Guardian of the Whills. Chirrut examines him, watches him, takes stock of what he shows and matches it up against the list that is still pinned to the inside of his head, the list that he spent years comparing himself to and failing at every turn. This man with his body hunched, curved over the core of him to keep everything out or to keep something in, with his thick hair falling in soft waves about his face, hiding the eyes and the mouth that presses tight for long moments as if every instant in the whole wide world is pain that he is trying not to see cannot be Baze Malbus. Chirrut stares at him, watches the way his throat works as he swallows one drink after another, says nothing, barely moves, hardly seems to exist at all, which is strange because he is a big man, large, broad across the shoulders, barrel shaped in the chest, arms and legs thick with muscle. He looks like a man who could sweep someone off their feet easily enough, but he moves slow as though bound by something unseen, something he will not shake off, will not leave behind. 

Chirrut watches him for a week before he approaches him, before he sits, cautious and slow, at the table across from him, waiting, not speaking, just hands folded on the table and eyes continuing to study the form of this strange shadow that has come crawling across Jedha, that answers, when it speaks at all, when it acknowledges anything outside of itself, to the name of Baze Malbus, the name of the most devout guardian of this age, a phantom Chirrut spent his days and his nights and his years trying to imitate without having seen any bit of him. 

People turn into someone else in stories. People take on the weight of the words that others speak of them. Legends are inflated, pretty things that toss away all the rough edges, all the intricacies of the reality of life, boil it down until it’s pure and fine and lovely. Chirrut knows this about stories, he knows to question their truth, but he also trusted the masters, trusted their judgement. He cannot imagine that they would have exaggerated the truth so much that the man in their stories and the man in front of him can be one and the same.

This man seems to be nothing at all other than haunted and quiet.

Chirrut cannot understand why he sits across from him once he is so close. There is nothing here to find out, nothing to discover because the truth is plain, it is right there in front of him, pinched and pained and altogether nothing special, nothing golden and glimmering and precious. Not in the way that he had always been told it would be. So it must be the wrong man. And yet.

And yet the Force curls like smoke around this man. It twists chains about his ankles and wrists, twines into the waves of his hair, which Chirrut can now see have intricate braids winding through the masses, and it coils across the expanse of his neck, a scarf, a noose. He has not seen many people so heavily covered in the Force before, never one who looks like this, so weighted, and it strikes him that he looks bound more than anything. Captured.

Time passes as Chirrut sits there, looking, while the ghost man simply drinks, slowly but constantly as though he only knows how to go through familiar motions. Chirrut wonders whether he even acknowledges that someone else is there or if his world is so firmly built on patterns that he will only see what he expects to. For a moment, Chirrut considers passing a hand in front of his face to see if that will be enough to startle him from this quiet complaceny, this never-ending inward contemplation. In the end, he doesn’t need to.

“Can I help you with something?” the man eventually asks, and his voice is like his laugh, low and dark, rich like caf but something inside is missing, there is a hollow, a hole where his words resound and disappear. It makes him hard to hear, but he does not pitch his voice up to compensate if he is even aware of the issue at all. No, he tucks his chin close to his body, which muffles the words still further so that Chirrut is practically crawling across the table to hear his perfect Jedhan, crisp at the edges, educated, out of place in the middle of this bar. A possible point to the masters in the way that he enunciates everything so carefully, a lovely rendition of words, the type of diction perfect for speaking to crowds, spreading the word, teaching about the Force on distant planets or speaking to pilgrims in the square. This is a tongue that has been taught to speak and yet does so hesitantly and softly, betraying the years spent mastering the skill, throwing them away on the dirty floor under their feet.

“You call yourself Baze Malbus?” he asks, a challenge, and he still expects something to shimmer, something to shine. Surely this will be like a fairy tale and once the magic words have been spoken the spell will be broken, this man will rise up, shake off the shadows, throw off his shackles and stand, tall and proud, a pillar, a pillar to build the temple back up on. Chirrut has been looking for people like this since the fall, since the exodus. The masters and guardians who were not killed have fled the moon or have struck out across the sands to live alone. They do not want to rise by his side. They tell him that the Force moves strangely sometimes, but it moves. They say that everything balances itself out if he will wait.

Chirrut is bad at waiting. Chirrut wants to fight, but he cannot take on the Empire alone. He is one man only even with all of his training, even with all of the skills nestled inside his body and his mind, even with the bright flash of the Force beside him, inside him. Baze Malbus, even if he were half of what the masters said, would be good to have at his side. This man. He does not know what would happen if he had this man by his side.

“I answer to Baze Malbus,” the man responds, and the words are careful, purposeful, though Chirrut isn’t sure that he can really shift them to see the truth that is plastered there. “I answer to a lot of things.” His eyes snap up for a moment, and they are not clouded, not as sad as they were a moment before. Perhaps they are hopeful, but Chirrut isn’t sure. They are hard to read, dark and endless, and he catches a reflection of himself there, shorn hair and Guardian robes and bright faced. It’s strange that he looks like he belongs there, and then it fades when the man blinks. “What would you like to call me?”

He has no answer for that inquiry, which is out of place, fingers questing for something, reaching out maybe to the first friendly face that he has seen. It is easy for anyone to recognize him for what he is because it has never crossed Chirrut’s mind to hide. Maybe his robes are what makes it easy for the man across from him to latch on, maybe the familiar calls to him like a warm glow, reminds him of when he might have been something. 

Chirrut says nothing for a moment, just regards him, wonders what the masters ever could have seen, whether they were blinded by the tight clenching of the Force that is everywhere around this man, hanging from him, nearly hanging him it seems, and Chirrut doesn’t know which one of the two of them is responsible for that latter action and cannot find the breath to ask. So he decides to go with something simple, something that might be a trap. “I’m Chirrut Imwe, a guardian of the Temple of the Whills.” It is haughty, high, a chord, a silver note, a bell. Please meet me here is said in the underpinnings of the words, but he does not know whether or not the man across from him still has ears to hear what goes unsaid. They are useless words really. Anyone in the bar, anyone who knows anything about Jedha at all, would know what he is on sight alone, and the man across from him smells keenly of Jedha even more than he looks like it with his skin the color of the sand, and his deep eyes the same as thousands who crowd the streets.

Those eyes across from him become sad again, wet, and he goes back to his drink, swallowing as mechanically as any droid works, set to a task. “There are no guardians anymore. There is no temple.”

Chirrut catches his hand before he can stop himself and then pulls back almost immediately because he is pain wrought through and through. It blazes across the Force in that instant as though looking for any outlet it can find, trying to wrap itself around his fingers, bind him as surely as it has caught the other. Chirrut flicks his hands, trying to shake it off like water, but it lingers, oil over his skin, a film across the expanse of his soul.

“I am sorry,” the man who answers to Baze Malbus says and pushes away from the table quicker than a man that size has any right to move, ducking out of the bar as though he had never been sitting across from him at all, leaving Chirrut with his hands held out in the air, sparks dancing over the tips of his fingers, staring, completely at a loss for what has just happened, unsure what to do next, but quietly convinced that this is not the man he seeks.

 

Chirrut means to leave him alone after that because the man who answers to Baze Malbus is either not him or has lost all the things that were integral to being him at all. So he can’t really explain what draws him back to the bar the next day, but he tells himself that it is boredom and curiosity. It is also that he wants the truth. He wants to know whether this man was ever the man he heard about, the man he compared himself to because the masters set it up that way, or if he is someone else altogether.

A name is a thing that can be shared. In more ways than one. Chirrut has always wanted to know the truth at the heart of things even when he had been warned, time and again by the masters, that sticking his nose into matters that did not involve him was likely to end in disaster. If anyone is disaster, it is the man who answers to Baze Malbus. But Chirrut thinks he will be fine. The man seems to be the most dangerous to himself, after all.

Chirrut saunters in, preparing to circle the room for a bit, stay at the edges until he can creep back to the table, but the man surprises him by kicking the chair across from him out in a silent invitation as soon as he sees him, which is surprising in and of itself because his hair falls across his face in waves that should block his vision. “Good evening,” Chirrut chirps, settling down in the chair and grinning. There are questions heavy on his tongue, but he isn’t sure whether it’s his place to ask them. At least not right now because the man who answers to Baze Malbus is drinking in that mechanical way of his again, and the wetness shines across his eyes as if any movement will break the glass there and let all the liquid out. While Chirrut has always wanted the truth, he does not want it at the expense of someone else’s comfort. “Are you alright?” he asks, leaning across the table, cautious of where he puts his hands because there is still a slight ache pushing at him in the Force from the contact the other day.

Baze looks at him over the top of the glass and shrugs. “Is anything alright these days, Chirrut? The temple is fallen.” His voice and tone are causal, friendly beneath the thick despair. There is an informality to everything he does now, the hunch of his shoulders, the way he looks at Chirrut as though he knows him quite well despite the fact that yesterday was the first time they ever spoke. Chirrut wonders whether it is his robes, the calling of a shared history even though their pasts were not personally linked. Baze Malbus, exalted figure, was something to be held over his own accomplishments every day of his life, a thing, a status he could never fully reach so he just eventually stopped trying, cleared his own path with staff and skill and wit alike. And Baze Malbus, exalted figure, never set eyes on him at all, likely never heard his name until yesterday. If this even is that exalted figure and not just some other boy, temple taught, who fled, who hides now under a name that he knows might protect him and clings to anything that reminds him of better days.

“The temple will never fall as long as you carry it with you,” Chirrut reprimands, voice harsher than he means it to be, but he did not come here expecting this scene, did not wander into this bar to watch the steadily sinking eyes of a maybe former guardian, hear the clear destruction of the world echoed in his voice. “The teachings never die as long as someone remembers them. If you are who I think you are, you already know that. And you know that you are meant to be better than this.” He stops speaking before he finishes it. The guardian known as Baze Malbus is meant to be more than a shattered man drinking himself to some quiet death in a bar where no one will care. They will simply roll him into the street. No one will know his name if he dies here. No one will say the rights. No one will care for his body properly. None of that. It was just be done. He will just be done. A ghost completely. Maybe this is what the man who answers to Baze Malbus wants at the end of the day, just to be done.

Chirrut doesn’t know why this strikes him as criminal. Chirrut doesn’t know why he cares at all because this man is lost. More than lost. Here is a man whose name was supposed to aspire him to better things throughout his life in the temple, a man now sunken to the bottom of a glass full of alcohol and his own tears. 

“Stop thinking you know who I am, bright one. That will be easier for both of us.” He reaches out a hand that taps against the top of Chirrut’s own, but this time there is no rush of Force sense, there is nothing but dry skin. The man who answers to Baze Malbus wraps his hand over Chirrut’s own and sighs before lifting an empty bottle with his other hand and shaking it. “I won’t hurt you today, brother. The demons are resting.”

Chirrut learns that the other slips while drunk, his words betray him more, get out in front of him. They still do not paint a good picture, do not even come close to the heights he had been lifted to, the praises that had been sung in his name. No, the man who answers to Baze Malbus is a dirty, dingy thing even when he finally mutters part of a mantra under his breath when he thinks no one is listening, and it is then that Chirrut catches his face with his hand and makes him look up, look him full in the eye, and he can see the lights of the temple there for a moment, he can see the kyber and the lanterns and the torches and the gleam, before it goes cold and dark and sad again. And when Baze exhales, booze-tainted, it is a shuddering thing that catches at Chirrut’s throat and almost presses him into words, questions. Did they raise you too high? Did you excel too fast? What happened? Where did you go? Where were you? His tongue cannot form the words. All he can do is press the questions out into the Force and wonder if the man across from him can feel them in the tips of his fingers, which linger, lightly tracing the stubble on the man’s chin and cheek. 

He does finally ask one question, but it just sets the man to laughing in the way that is not pleasant at all because it sounds like something being pulled into the darkness to die. “Where are you?”

“Fallen.” 

Chirrut had not expected an answer at all and that one makes his eyes water and his throat clench to the point that all he can do is nod. Nod and hold the other man’s face until something crashes in the distance, pulling his attention away, and then the man has caught his hand and is tugging him out, out into the windy night and away from the small bar. 

The man who answers to Baze Malbus kisses him first. Pressed against the stone wall in the alleyway beside the bar, the man’s hand on his face tenderly, as though wary of breaking something in him but still needing the contact, wanting to make sure that the person in front of him is there. His eyes are wet. They are always wet, full of the rain that so rarely falls on Jedha. If they could loose the torrent contained inside this man, Chirrut thinks they would have water for years. Water enough to wash the sand away and find a whole different moon waiting for them underneath. His eyes are wet, and he is so close that Chirrut can feel the warmth radiating from his body though he cannot say whether this is natural or because of the alcohol. What he does know is that the man’s eyes drift from his, where they have been boring tiny holes as though trying to find something there, to his lips and then back, a question, a pleading. And Chirrut doesn’t know why, not really because this is the last thing he had expected when all of this started, but he nods. Barely. Almost imperceptibly but enough.

And then, only then, does the man kiss him. It is not his first, but he thinks it might as well be because nothing has ever felt like this before. The Force crackle, the twist in his stomach, the way the hand on his face drops just a fraction to rest on his neck, fingers curling to cradle the back of his head, the way that the man who answers to Baze Malbus shudders against him as he presses further into the kiss, all of it is enough to undo him. This man is a ghost. He might as well be kissing a spirit, but he does kiss back. Even though the man tastes of some vile rotgut, the tang of alcohol sharp and everywhere, but behind it. Behind it Chirrut gets a taste of something else, something he recollects from the temple, cardamom, a bright almost citrus note, out of place and beguiling. Like everything else about this man.

“Starshine,” the man breaths against his lips when he pulls away, panting, and the wetness has leaked, trailing slight tears down both his cheeks that the man who answers to Baze Malbus does not seem to even realize are there. 

Chirrut doesn’t know if he is talking to him. He never seems to know whether the man is talking to him or not because when he speaks very little makes sense, it just runs together. This would be a good time to press him, ask him more questions, bid him to join him, see if he will fight against the Empire with him, but he does none of this. What he does instead is reach up to tug at one of the braids in the man’s hair and smile at him. “I normally like to become a little more acquainted with people before a kiss,” he teases.

“You already think you know me. What else is there to tell?”

Everything, Chirrut wants to shout. There is everything to tell because nothing adds up, nothing makes sense. Everything is riddles and things he thinks he knows that surely cannot be right. And then the man is running a thumb over his lips, and his brain sparks again because it has been a bit since anyone touched him and he revels in it. Chirrut has always lived in sensation, always survived on the companionship of having others close by even if only in friendship. In the months since the temple has fallen, no one has touched him tenderly, and he yearns for it. 

“You don’t know anything about me at all,” he counters, teeth snapping at the finger in mock irritation when what he wants to do is capture that mouth again, pull the thumb between his lips to suck it and see how the man who answers to Baze Malbus reacts to that. He wants to know what sorts of debauched noises he could pull from someone who is supposed to be a pillar of virtue. 

The man touches their foreheads together in an intimate gesture that reeks of the temple, and Chirrut wishes he would hide it all better because the difference between what he is and what he could be is unsettling. It makes every piece of his heart ache, and it sends shivers through the Force. Chirrut watches the Force noose around Baze’s neck seem to tighten just a touch, and wants nothing more than to toss it to the ground, but when he reaches for it all his hands find is warm, distracting skin that he could caress into oblivion until the stars fell. If he let himself. He doesn’t know if he should let himself and pulls his hands away. 

“Tell me, bright one.”

Chirrut doesn’t know why the phrase sends a shudder down his spine, especially when he can’t tell whether or not it is supposed to be pleasant or some kind of joke. The man’s tone doesn’t change, isn’t lighter or sweeter. It is just flat and level, perfect Jedhan, educated tilt to his tongue. All the signs of the temple burned into his body, and Chirrut wonders what other things linger on his body under the simple clothes he wears. Virtue is one thing that Chirrut never minded failing at, but he isn’t sure what to do here in this moment, how far to let himself fall, whether he will ever be able to climb back up again once it starts. There will be no hands to hold, nothing to help him. If he slips, will he fall forever? Can he trust the man who answers to Baze Malbus to be anything on the list pinned behind his eyes? What happens when he is none of them at all? What will happen to Chirrut?

“I,” his words stick in his throat as the man’s fingers on the back of his neck shift up slightly into his hair, stroking gently at the short locks. He should go. He should turn tail and never come back because this is not a man who is going to stand next to him in battle, this is not a man to build a temple on. This is a man of wreck and ruin. Yet this is a man wrapped in the Force. This is a man birthed by the temple whose every word and movement betrays him though he tries to hide, tries to drown it. Chirrut wonders how many ways he has tried to escape who and what he is, Chirrut wants to know all the stories in his wet eyes, all the scars roped across his buried heart, the reason why the Force is a persistent, cloying thing wrapped around his body. He wants to loose the demons and see whether they can be bested. 

There is no one to teach. There are no pilgrims to bless. There are no initiates to help. There is no temple. There is no kyber for him to sing to save for the shard in the staff that he built when he became a guardian. Nothing that Chirrut has sunk his hands into, nothing that he has threaded his fingers with, remains to him. The only piece of the temple that he can touch right now is in front of him, and it is ruined as surely as all the rest. Guard the kyber, guard the temple, guard Jedha, guard the Force. Chirrut Imwe is a guardian, and the man who answers to Baze Malbus looks like he could use guarding. From himself most of all. 

The man is silent but not dour, not stern in that moment. He just hovers, eyes wet and waiting, mouth no longer a terse line but moving silently, as though he chants with no sound, and his hands are still where they linger, the one in his hair, the other on his waist. He does not press. He stands as though he could wait forever, as though decades could come and go and still find him, a statue with a hole in the center at it. For a moment, Chirrut thinks he sees what used to be, what might have been, a glimmer of a promise, but it flickers, falters, and then the man is stepping away as though he has done something wrong, as though Chirrut has waited too long and now the opening has passed. 

“Wait,” Chirrut insists, catching his wrist, and the man stills, makes no move to break the grip, which is loose, so loose because Chirrut cannot bring himself to use any of his strength, not when his is afraid every moment of watching the Force strangle this man all the way to death in front of him. How can he visit any more pain on this man when he can see how much agony he is already in? How could anyone hurt this man who is beautiful and not just in the way that broken things are though that is the most prevalent at the moment. Someone should fill your cracks with gold, he thinks, but cannot say because they are in an alley beside a bar, because this man is drunk, because the wind is howling, because he has known him for less than ten hours and the idea of saying something that forward is terrifying. None of that makes it any less true.

“What do you want to know?” Chirrut asks, and he is meant to be wittier than this, almost always is, silver tongued and cheeky, never serious according to the masters. Yet faced with these delicate shards, so close to the edge of breaking, when faced with this ghost, the teasing is not the first thing that rises to the tip of his tongue. He is awkward and fumbling, foolish, like a youngling dealing with the first stirrings of affection towards another.

The man who may or may not be a legend, who may or may not have been the unfurling success story of the temple, sighs and the sound is a shuddering, the wind in the trees in the temple garden battering the branches against the windows. How could Chirrut have ever thought that he was not of the temple? Even if it he is not Baze Malbus, he is of the temple, and the temple is of him. “Pretty things,” the man says and smiles, wistful and sad all at once. Lie to me, he may as well have said. Pretend for me. Give me hope. Protect me. 

It is a humbling. It is a plea passed from brother to brother. Guardian, guard me. And Chirrut’s mouth has grown dry, and his stomach is a cold, barren place while his heart stutters somewhere between want and terror in his chest. He should not accept whatever this is that is being held out to him. He should not. It will be ruin he knows as surely as he knows anything. But does he know anything? Can anyone ever truly know anything? Always keep learning. Knowledge never comes to an end, the temple taught. Knowledge is ever flowing. Everyone you meet will teach you something. Everyone you meet will change you.

How will you change me? Chirrut wonders, looking at the man who answers to Baze Malbus. Another thought follows quickly on it’s heels, how will knowing me change you?

The way that the man who answers to Baze Malbus tilts his head and clears his throat reminds Chirrut that the conversation is not at an end. How is he at a loss for words? Nothing has ever managed to steal those before. It has always been the one thing about himself that he could count on, words and words for days, words to distract and words to hide and words to shine, steal people’s hearts with, distract them with. But this man looks at him, and they dry up, leave him floundering. “The sunlight through the windows in the main temple,” he says because it is a pretty thing, it is a thing that he misses, and it is a thing that is surely part of them both.

And the man nods as though this is enough. In this moment, in the middle of an alley after a kiss, after startlingly strange intimacy, a half spun memory of light through a window is enough to sustain him for a moment. Chirrut wonders what it feels like to be that starved. “Tomorrow?” he asks, and Chirrut can only nod because he doesn’t know what it means, there are too few words, everything this man gives seems to be too little to make sense as though the muchness of his body and the Force keep everything else from getting out, but Chirrut is stuck now. He thinks he would agree to anything to see where this leads.

He watches as the man disappears into the shadows soundlessly. How can someone so large, how can someone whose presence screams, be so quiet? He watches the man just fade, like a specter, like a phantom, and the words of the masters ring in his head, “Be careful what you pour yourself into, Chirrut, because some vessels are full of holes.. Be careful when you play with disaster. Not every situation will benefit you. Sometimes all you can learn is heartbreak.”

There is always something to learn.

 

When Chirrut gets to the bar the next day, plodding through sandy streets and dancing his way around crowds, his bright smile keeping him from trouble, he hears the whistle before he even opens the door. It chimes three notes from a temple song, and he turns toward the sound to see the man who answers to Baze Malbus lingering in the alley. There is sun on him. This is the first time that Chirrut has seen him in the light of day, and he suddenly never wants to view him any other way. Sunlight makes him look more real, more substantial, as though he is not just a shade fading in and out of sight, called forth when the despair of the city becomes too thick not to take physical form. His breath catches in his throat as he looks at the man standing there, the man who cannot be much older than him even though he stands like he knows all the pain that has ever existed. 

Chirrut would like to be suave and light on his feet, would love to reclaim the silver on his tongue that seemed to erode the moment he laid eyes on the man in the bar, but instead he is almost solemn when he steps into the cool of the alley to join him. “No drinking today?” He can manage a bit of teasing, after all, and this realization calms him, reassures him, but it does not stop his fingers from twitching or ease the desire to trace them over the fine planes of the man’s skin. Show me what you’re hiding, he wants to say. All of it, all of it. He wants to drink it down in order to understand it better, feel it like the glass he is sure it will be in his throat, down, down into the hidden, dark recesses of his body until it soaks into his blood, becomes part of him and slowly imparts the knowledge that way.

“You wanted to talk,” the man who answers to Baze Malbus huffs, surly and short but not impatient, not unkind. “Pretty things don’t belong in that bar.” 

Then why are you there? Chirrut would ask if he were his normal self. When did he lose all his courage? What is he worried of that he can’t say these things? That the man who answers to Baze Malbus will flee, disappear, never to be seen again? Or that he will respond in kind? Which alternative is more terrifying? Chirrut has never felt more full of questions, has never been so confused. He thinks that the bar is a good place to hide pretty things, soft things, things with cracks all along their edges and holes in the middle of them because it is so dark that no one will look closely, no one will see their value, they will just let it fade forever. No one will hurt them anymore, but also no one will try to help them. Is that what this is? Is this man holding a hand out for assistance or is this something else?

What does he want it to be?

“Where do they belong then?” In the curve of that lip. In those braids. In that dry, warm skin. In those wet, wet eyes. Where can he press all the pretty things that this man wants to hear about? Where will he let him press them might be the better question to ask. Chirrut’s skin is fire just thinking about it, and he shifts his weight impatiently because the man answers as slowly as any master ever answered, deliberating words and silences, planning them out as though the fate of the universe rests on how they are said. Just speak, Chirrut wants to scream. Just talk to me!

Words, he needs, and touch, but this man offers so little and so much of both at the same time that it is maddening. And addictive. Chirrut thinks that he would languish days away in one perfectly sculpted syllable if allowed, which is startling and terrifying because he has only just met this man as he is instead of as the myth spun by the masters, the way he thought he knew him. Now he wonders whether the masters ever even knew Baze Malbus at all or if he was just a figment of their imagination? Is this a real man in front of him or a spirit conjured by want? Is Baze Malbus the name of a Force ghost who becomes what is needed the most, the perfect Guardian for the temple, the spitting image of despair for a moon sent toppling into ruin? 

And what for him? Someone to save, someone to save him. An equal. A dark reflection with lovely hands and soft kisses and wavy hair who tastes of alcohol and cardamom and looks at everything with wet eyes when Chirrut has yet to cry for anything that has happened, yet to feel that keening, aching, ripping loss. He keeps just in front of it but one day it will close around him too, the sorrow, try as he might to outrun its reach.

“What are you?” he asks, forgetting that the man who answers to Baze Malbus has yet to answer his previous question. Maybe if he stacks them like cordwood, puts a pile down, he will eventually be greeted with something approaching an answer to something. Pick your battles, the masters always said. Chirrut has never been able to pick, wants to take on everything within his reach, and Baze is within his reach now if he steps forward, if he lifts his hand.

“Nothing, bright one.” There is the fondness from the other night, there is the tenderness. In those words, in that phrase, which he thinks now is meant for him, and in the way that the man moves so he can brush his thumb over Chirrut’s lips again, like he cannot stand not to touch him and like he wants more, so much more, which sends ice and fire down Chirrut’s spine, shrinks the world down around them until they are the only two people who exist. It is a dangerous feeling, all consuming, distracting and lovely.

Before he can react, the hand is moving away from his face and down to his wrist, the grip steady but soft. Everything soft about the man who answers to Baze Malbus is surprising. Everything is confusing, and Chirrut is not used to not being clever enough to suss things out quickly and easily. How can someone so pained be so gentle with him? How can someone choking on his own despair touch him with only tenderness? It makes no sense. It is endlessly intriguing, and it shimmers like lights on the kyber crystals. Chirrut follows as the man leads them down alleys deep into the heart of the city, to places that Chirrut has never been to before in all of his years there. The man leads him up a flight of stairs to a door behind which is a small set of rooms. They are cramped and sparse but clean, so unlike the bedraggled state of the man himself with his wrinkled clothes, his tangled hair, the patchy stubble on his face, and his wet, wet eyes.

So it is only yourself that you can’t care for, Chirrut thinks as he looks at him and then at the rooms surrounding them. The only thing unworthy of your heart is yourself. He would ask why, but he can’t. Not when he knows that he will have to watch the Force noose clench and the wet drip from his eyes, unable to do anything to stop either.

Guardian, guard me. It is a phrase that jumps into his mind when he sees this man, and he cannot push it away, cannot bid it to let him be. Chirrut isn’t even sure that he wants it to let him be. Would it be easier to fall into it? Would it be better or ruin for them both? How can he know if he doesn’t take the plunge? And this is strange. This is strange because Chirrut, reckless boy of the temple, has never known a plunge that made him hesitate, but it has never been his heart on the line before just his body, and he trusts his limbs more than this shuddering, deceptive, strange thing rattling away in his chest. Leaping across the span between rooftops makes sense. He can judge the distance, knows the strength in his legs, knows how to tuck and roll on the landing. This is something he doesn’t know how to gauge, wishes he did, wishes he could make it simple because it is not. He could walk away. That would be simple, but he can’t talk himself into it now, not with that grip around his wrist, not with the sight of those braids, small, precious things lost in that mass of hair like fragile birds in a tree. He cannot walk away now.

As soon as they are across the threshold, the man’s hand slips down to squeeze his, once, and then lets go. Chirrut feels like he has lost something, some limb he only recently gained and wraps an arm around his waist to steady himself as he turns in the center of the small main room, looking when there is nothing to look at save a small table, a bedroll in the corner, a wardrobe leaning haphazardly and two chairs that look like they are on the verge of collapsing. The furniture is as unstable as Baze. All of his life is skewed, precipitous and ready to fall down if the wind blows too hard. Yet clean. Another habit of the temple. Clean and stark, minimal possessions because the spiritual needs come before those of the material. 

The man who answers to Baze Malbus has stepped into what seems to be an alcove but actually serves as a tiny kitchen complete with another small table, a double cupboard, a sink, a hot plate and a rice cooker. As Chirrut watches, Baze takes a kettle, a teapot and a metal container of tea out of the cupboard, easily filling his broad arms with the items as though he could hold so much more, as though his arms could swallow up everything in the universe and still have room leftover, that he would load himself up with it all without even a mutter of complaint. That speaks of the Baze Malbus the masters knew. 

Without a word, he settles everything on the table and then goes through the motions of making tea. There is a quiet serenity to him that Chirrut hasn’t seen before. It didn’t exist in the bar, though it was echoed in the mechanical motions of drinking, and it wasn’t on display in the alley. Here he thinks he can look through the heavy pall to see a spark, something that remains of life, though maybe it is just an echo. Just a recording, muscle memory telling him what to do and how to act with company. As he watches him fill the kettle and prepare the pot and the cups, Chirrut almost loses himself in the precision of the man’s movements because they are clockwork, fine perfection, something to aspire to.

“I don’t see any pretty things,” he taunts, at a loss for what else to say because, once again, he is struck by the difference between what is in front of him and what he saw before. How many layers are there to this man? 

The wet eyes are on him, and Chirrut wants to duck from their steady weight, wants to escape before he never can, and yet he stands, transfixed, and needs to know what happens next, what happens now. Baze Malbus, he wants to say, come out from hiding, and we can take the world back together. I won’t let them hurt you. I just need someone by my side. I need someone to fight for. I need someone at my back. I am terrible alone, I am terribly alone, and so are you. Together we can be so much more. 

“I do,” the man says, eyes locked on him and there is that smile again, sad and a little bit shy.

Is this how people woo, Chirrut wonders? He has been kissed before. He has let his hands wander wantonly across the skin of his fellows in the middle of the night after training when adrenaline was high or just because one of his brothers had the loveliest cheekbones and it set his heart to hammering. He has felt fingers brush him in intimate places and chased those sensations into the dark of night. But no one has wooed him. Those were all fleeting, one time encounters, never repeated with the same people because attachments were considered problematic but not forbidden. Flesh was known to have its wants and desires, and Chirrut never connected that with what his heart wanted because it never ached so keenly before that he had to listen. It is all he can hear right now, though he has no idea what language it is shouting at him in, it just rushes in his ears like the pounding of rain during the harsh storms. 

But is this how people woo? With light touches and shy smiles and eyes that stray and electricity in the air? With subtle, feather light confusion and spun glass words? He wonders if Baze would answer him if he asked. He wonders if Baze even knows the answer himself or if this is all just politeness or the panicked, needy grasp of a man who cannot let go of all the pieces of their past and is trying to hold fast to him because he is comfortable. And yet this is the same man who was so adamant that the temple was gone. So many layers. So many possibilities. And all Chirrut can do is stand there, head tilted, and watch him, wondering what it would be like to peel those layers off, one by one like clothes, until he can reach into the heart of him, trace fingers across his glistening mind, offer caresses to his bruised and battered soul, wash away all the dirty, damaged bits until he shines, until he glows.

“I don’t have any honey,” Baze offers a moment later. “So it won’t be the same as it was in the temple.” 

Strange, small pieces. Strange, small offerings held out to him when he least expects it. Chirrut is not used to being caught off guard, and he is certainly not accustomed to feeling like he is adrift as constantly as he has since the alley, since the kiss. Before that happened he just thought he was seeking out a man to help him strike at Stormtroopers, to trouble them, bother them in the streets and make sure they knew that they could knock the temple down, they could fire on the manifestation of the spiritual heart of the city, but that it would not fall, not really. Now he doesn’t know what is happening, why he is here. The man who answers to Baze Malbus is nothing but an endless string of questions as much as he is a bleeding heart, leaking eyes, a ghost. Yet he looks so much more substantial in the middle of a tiny kitchen in a stark, clean set of rooms with wavy hair that needs to be taken care of, fussing over the fact that he has no honey as if that will disappoint Chirrut and calling him pretty like they are sweethearts.

“I don’t need honey,” he finally concedes. “I just want to talk to you.” The second admission is out before he can stop it, before he can fully even realize that it has happened. He would wish to take it back, but the way that the man looks down, quietly pleased, makes his chest hurt such that he cannot begrudge him any words, considers asking him for a list of words he wants to hear just so he can recite all of them and watch him react. 

Chirrut hastens to help him, but Baze waves him away in a fashion that would only require a towel to complete the look of domesticity. “You’re my guest,” he grumbles as though put upon and shoos Chirrut back to the main room where he settles on the ground in front of the rickety table and just watches the man move through his small kitchen, the graceful way he manages to twist and turn in the cramped space. The fact that he has an actual tea tray he settles the cups and the pot on is astonishing, and Chirrut wonders what else might be left up his sleeve.

The Force still clings, much too tight across his arms and legs and neck, but it has softened a little, it no longer seems ready to choke him at a moment’s notice. Chirrut can’t read it, which is strange as well because in the temple the masters always praised him on his ability to communicate and sense the Force, its eddies and waves and meanings, its path. But the energy around the man who answers to Baze Malbus--who he thinks is Baze Malbus more and more with each situation that unfolds, a Baze Malbus not spoken of in the temple, the real man under the legends and the stories, a man hindered and hurt and fallen, yes, but not quite as ruined, not quite as hollow as he had thought at first, as he makes himself out to be--is different, darker, thicker, and doesn’t respond much when he tries to reach out to it. He wonders if this is because it holds to Baze or because Baze holds to it, his demons as he mentioned the other day. Chirrut wants to dismantle all of it, wants to free his limbs because it looks suffocating, it looks like it will drown him utterly, and he, more and more against all of his better judgement, needs for that not to happen. 

Is this what it is to fall in love? He doesn’t know how to answer that question either, and he doesn’t know why his thoughts go there so quickly. It has been less than three days, and they are likely only drawn together because the sense of the other is familiar. Chirrut in his robes, with the words of the temple on his lips. Baze with the temple reeking from his pores, painted over every motion he makes even if he does not fully acknowledge it. They are alone, cast adrift in the city, and it makes sense for them to reach for each other for companionship. But there is friendship, which Chirrut has known, and there is passion, lust, which Chirrut has known, and then there is this thing, which Chirrut has never known before and thus cannot define, but his heart stutters strangely and his stomach fists and he wants to run his fingers through that wavy hair and fix the braids and wipe the wetness from those eyes, and he can’t say why he needs to do any of this except that he does, except that it sits there, heavy, so heavy on his chest that it could force all the air out and he would let it without hesitation.

“I thought you would be more talkative,” Baze says in that same flat voice with its educated lilt and perfect diction, but now that it is so quiet Chirrut can hear a slight accent, the barest hint of one of the city’s many cultures lingering at the edges. It makes him smile because it is a piece, it is something that he didn’t have before, but it is so small. He could spend years gathering up tiny bits like this and still never know enough about the ghost in front of him.

“Normally people complain that they can’t shut me up,” he offers with a slight smile. It has been hard for him to smile when so close to Baze Malbus. They keep faltering right off his face because they don’t feel right. It doesn’t feel like what he needs to be offering up. He doesn’t know what he needs to be offering up, and this man is not much help in that department. 

“I make you nervous.”

Tease him. Make him laugh. Make him smile. Flirt with him. Be silly. Be clever. Be wise. His brain shouts at him, tries to spur him forward into his normal actions, his usual tactics. As if any of these will be enough to impress this man whose legends resounded in the halls, ten feet high. “No,” he says after a moment, fingers moving around the edge of the cup, which is fine, much finer than anything else in the rooms, as though all of Baze’s credits went to this single piece of luxury, as though this is the line he needed to draw between what he had been and what he has become. “Not nervous. Just.” He reaches for a memory, something from the temple to use as a stepping stone between them, a common ground. “You remember the kyber songs?”

Baze nods, his wet eyes a heavy weight on Chirrut, his hair a tangled mess, his mouth neither frowning nor smiling but sad somehow anyway, and Chirrut wants to kiss that away but stops himself. He is in the middle of something here. He cannot just kiss everything away no matter how much he wants to, no matter how lovely he thinks that tactic would be it will solve nothing, not really. Especially not until he knows what needs to be solved.

“Each kyber shard had its own song but some of them were very hard to hear. Only the best masters, only those strongest in the Force, could sing some of the songs. Even for them it could take a very long time before they were able to get there.” Chirrut reaches a hand out and places it, palm up, on the table, an offering, a showing that there is nothing to fear. “It’s like I’m trying to figure out your song, but it keeps changing so I have to start over, which is very distracting. You are very distracting. And I see. What you mean about pretty things.” His other hand still lingers on the lovely cup, and he taps the side of it gently with a nail to indicate that it is one of those. Baze is as well, but he is having a harder time getting that message across.

The man who answers to Baze Malbus traces a finger across his palm, slowly, and Chirrut watches him, knows he is following the lines that dance there, lines women in the marketplace have asked if he would like read. “You would do better to stop, Chirrut. I will not be good for you. My song will not be good for you. If there even is one. I can’t hear it anymore. I can’t hear any of them anymore. All I hear is screaming. All I see is blood.”

Chirrut catches his fingers, tugs the hand securely into his own, wraps his fingers tight, protective, and he thinks that if he could force security into his body through their joined hands, he would, but it does not work like that. 

“You cut through it a little, bright one, but you should not indulge me. I did not lie to you. I am fallen. I am nothing. I am not the guardian you heard of anymore. If I ever was. I will only let you down.” The wet has escaped his eyes again and tracks across cheeks the color of Jedhan sand, but the man does not even seem to notice it. Yet again he seems to cry without knowing what his physical body is doing like he is not connected to it at all.

And Chirrut cannot be still now, cannot listen to those words, cannot watch this man flay himself down to pulp in front of him. He scrabbles around the table until his fingers are brushing the wetness away, and the man has sunk his hands into his robes, fisted his fingers into them gently, gently, as though he is worried about destroying the fabric, as though he is worshiping the vestments themselves. “The Force is with you.” It is meant as a comfort, a balm. It does not work out that way.

Baze laughs, the desperate, despairing one. “I know. It won’t leave me. It reminds me.”

“Of what?” he asks, wants to press, press Baze, press the Force, for answers, for a reason. Why him? Why torture him? Why wrap so tight, why bind him? “What are your demons, Baze? Tell me. You can tell me.”

More tears fall just as silent, bright like rain in sunshine, and Chirrut catches them on his own skin, wonders if they will soak into his flesh and impart the knowledge that he wants. “I cannot tell you. I will not tell you.” Baze settles a hand on the back of his neck again, fingers tracing across the flesh and into his hair, and Chirrut shudders at that, almost lost in the contact. “You would never come anywhere near me then.”

I can’t imagine not being near you, Chirrut wants to tell him, but it is too soon for that. It is too intense and too strange and too much. It is just too much. Everything he has felt, everything he has thought since meeting this man, since running full tilt into him, has been too much, and he worries that he will drown in it, that he will be lost in it. But maybe. Maybe he can pull Baze back to the surface, out of his own watery grave, back to the world. Or maybe they can meet halfway in the middle. “I am with you,” he tries. Maybe he cannot fight all those dark thoughts that dance, cannot dry up all the water in those eyes on his own, but he can help. If Baze will let him help.

“You should run.”

“You’re at a disadvantage,” he says, leaning closer, his lips brushing across Baze’s own. So close and yet so far, unable to cross that final small space. Meet me here. “I have never run away from anything that I set my mind to doing.”

“You’re a fool.”

“But a pretty one,” he teases.

And then, then Baze laughs. It is true. It is clear, and it is true, and it is stunning. It rings, bells in the temple, kyber songs in the night, and Chirrut would live inside that sound if he could. He wants to dedicate his life to making that chime sound again and again and again. 

“Yes,” Baze says when the laughter falls away, and Chirrut has closed his eyes because it is so sweet, too sweet to keep them open for, so he does not see when Baze closes that small space between them. “The prettiest fool.” His words are almost completely lost in the kiss he presses to Chirrut’s mouth, and Chirrut, hands still on his cheeks, thumbs tracing over the skin gently, tenderly, protectively, moans into it, opens his mouth, deepens it, needs it. Now Baze tastes like tears and jasmine tea and cardamom, light and kyber and mornings spent in the temple with prayers hanging in the air as thick as the incense.

Chirrut threads fingers into Baze’s hair and holds him there as his kisses try and impart their own message. Stay. Stay. I will not disappoint you. You just have to give me a chance. I could not live up to you in the temple, but I found a way. I made my own way. I never gave up. I will not give up on you, Baze Malbus. I will not let you sink. Stay. He doesn’t know if Baze can understand the message, but he hopes that he can because Chirrut still has hope in him, blazing, flinging sparks into the air, waiting for timber to come along that he can pass the fire to. He wonders how beautiful they could be burning together.

 

“Did you know of me? In the temple?” Chirrut’s hands are in Baze’s hair, separating the strands, combing them out to lustrous perfection, attempting to free the sorrow and the pain that has anchored itself there. He loves the feel of it and the pleased, deep noises that Baze makes as he relaxes into the contact, one of the few times that he seems to ever truly relax. It is intoxicating, almost enough to convince Chirrut that there is nothing better he could do with his hands than keep them busy with this task forever, and he would, he thinks, if Baze asked. 

It has been a week, and they have settled into something that is comfortable though still strange because of its quick intimacy. Chirrut has learned that Baze’s demons come and go as they please and sometimes his skin is tinged dark with that crackling, smothering Force energy. Sometimes, no matter how much he wants to, Chirrut cannot stand to touch him at all because, as Baze had warned, there is shouting, there is blood, there is the overwhelming sense of something being terribly wrong, something that cannot be healed, and it will coat him, surround him, drown him. The sight of Chirrut flinching from it, his grimaces, seem to hurt Baze more than his own pain, more than his wet eyes and soft voice. So Chirrut stays at arms length, talking, singing, teasing, now that he has managed to mostly find his voice again after it was startled away by the sight and the proximity of this man, until it lifts enough that he can run hands over skin, press kisses against cheek and neck and lips. Baze will not let him kiss elsewhere, will not let him see or touch, and Chirrut wonders what hides beneath the clothing where his fingers and his lips are not sanctioned to go that can be so terrible or if it is just Baze hanging onto another shred of temple life as much as possible. For a man who seems to have disconnected himself from the temple,, Baze lives in it, carries it around on his back even as he speaks of nothing but its fall in the same breath.

Perhaps Chirrut could build a temple on his man, after all, the way he thought he might be able to when he sought him out that first day in the bar, but he would not now, now that he has seen the ghost and the fear in his heart, now that he has known the laughter and the smiles and the secret, sweet words, and the tears. It would be cruel to put anything else on this man. Now Chirrut busies himself trying to lift the rocks as much as anything else, trapped in his orbit, pouring what he thinks is love into all the broken pieces in an attempt to fit them together again. He doesn’t know if he makes any difference, if this is a task that he should carry on at doing, but he cannot seem to tear himself away from it.

Like he told Baze, he has never turned away from something once he puts his mind to it. As it turns out, his heart is even more stubborn, and his heart has set itself on this wreck, this ruined ghost who wanders the streets, who gruffs, who shouts in the middle of the night, still sleeping, until Chirrut presses his fingers to his clothed shoulders and the base of his spine and pushes to release it and then the arms will be about him and the tears will fall, the nightmare broken, though Baze will never utter a word about it, not one perfectly practiced syllable. Even when Chirrut asks, even when Chirrut would gladly take it all. I was never hailed as the pride of the temple like you, he wants to say, but I can pull my weight, more than my weight, I can carry your shackles too if you let me. 

Baze allows none of it, is full of penance and sorrow and something dark and twisted that he cannot give voice to, something he cannot cry out no matter how many tears trace their way down his cheeks of their own accord, disconnected from his mind. He insists that not all the tears are his own, and Chirrut believes this as much as he has ever believed in anything. It would make sense for the Baze Malbus the masters spoke of to cry for his brothers and sisters, to cry for the kyber, to cry for the temple, for Jedha, and the Force itself. It makes sense, but it is not fair. It is not fair for it to visit all of that on him, and Chirrut can understand when he kisses the other’s tears away, when he presses soothing hands against his cheeks, how people can lose faith in the face of great cruelty. 

Baze reaches a hand back to catch at Chirrut’s fingers, and Chirrut lets him delay them from their task, delights in the caress. Despite the fact that Baze is taller and broader, his hands are barely a shade larger than Chirrut’s, his fingers not as lean and long or nimble, his palms only bigger by a breath. When they twine their hands together, Chirrut is surprised by the fact that his are the ones that look stronger, more capable, while Baze’s look softer, more inclined to be found in a library than in the middle of a fight. What kind of Guardian were you fashioned to be, he will wonder as he looks at the hands, not as scarred as his, not as callused. He has been tempted to ask him to spar, test the limits of Baze’s body, see whether he is capable of besting him, but he does not because the idea of striking the other, even in friendly competition, feels wrong when the Force seems to have decided that these are the only shoulders for sorrow in all of Jedha. Chirrut can only touch him gently, kiss him fleetingly, caress him with the same tenderness one would use with flowers to make sure that they do not bruise the petals. 

One day maybe they will spar. One day maybe he will be able to get under all that cloth and suck kisses onto the hidden skin and bite until Baze moans and writhes under him. One day maybe he will not be concerned about breaking him more, hollowing him out more at the center until nothing is left, and Baze just crumbles away into nothing. Chirrut isn’t sure he knows how to go about all of this. His fellows stopped coming to him for comfort years ago because they found he was the one with a glib joke, more likely to do something for them to laugh at than try and dry their tears. The openness of sorrow, of pain, is startlingly to him and altogether too much. It is easier to deal with on Baze, though it is hard for him to say why. Chirrut wants to learn for him, and maybe for himself as well. So that he can be better with his own tender, wounded feelings, which seem to flit away in bright bursts of laughter because he cannot handle them any other way. 

It strikes him in strange places, at strange times, that he still has yet to cry, has yet to mourn the loss of the temple, of his temple life. Perhaps he is dry inside. Perhaps Baze cries for him as well. I don’t know what to do with them, he wants to whisper in the middle of the night when Baze is either the softest or the hardest depending, but give me my tears back because I cannot stand the thought of drowning you slowly myself.

Sometimes. Sometimes Baze will lay a hand on his robes, over his heart, and just look at him with those wet eyes as though he is waiting, as though the beats of Chirrut’s skittering heart are speaking to him, imparting some truth that even Chirrut cannot hear. Chirrut never asks what Baze hears there, what he is trying to feel. He just kisses him until they are both winded because all of those fragile things will break in his too strong hands. The temple taught him to be a whirlwind in the sand, and he will shred all of his own delicate thoughts into pieces if he touches them. Baze, on the other hand, can touch everything but harms nothing except himself. What did the temple make you? Chirrut wonders as those lovely, scholar fingers brush over his own, find each raised scar with purpose and care. Did they make you at all? Or did you rise from the sands of the moon itself to trundle your way across it, soft and blooming and losing all your pieces with every step because things made of sand cannot hold together forever?

“Did you know of me?” Chirrut asks again because sometimes Baze needs reminding that something has been said, that he is waiting. Baze gets lost in the whorls and eddies of the Force and his own mind, he has found. It’s not always slow deliberation about what words are best to say or how much he wants to reveal. Sometimes it seems very much to just be about getting out of everything else that clamors for his attention. But Chirrut can be loud, and Chirrut can be pushy, and Chirrut can remind him, gently, that he is there.

The fingers on his tighten for a moment and then Baze shakes his head. “I did not. I wish I had. Perhaps everything would have played out for the better.”

“There is no sense in wishing the past to be different,” Chirrut chides him. “All is as the Force wills it to be then as well as now.” Said convincingly and as though he, too, does not wish that they could have known each other in the temple. He has always wanted this to be true. When he was younger it was because he wanted to see the other with his own eyes, wanted to find something that he could best him at, show the masters that he was just as capable as their favorite, perfect one. Now, though, now he wishes he had been there to watch every slow smile, hear every tinkling laugh, to watch Baze at his studies because he is sure that this man would have been the most beautiful thing in the temple library, in the temple garden, in the temple. He is positive that in initiate robes, in Guardian robes, Baze put all the rest to shame, glowed softly and sweetly, with those big eyes and his smile. With close cropped hair, Chirrut knows his ears would have stood out starkly, a little awkward but still lovely. Chirrut would have liked to know him when he was younger, would have liked the chance to be the first to ever kiss him or sit with him, quiet, in the kyber caves, learn together, help each other with their studies. All of this is past. None of this will exist except inside his head, in the small fantasies he builds in the middle of his heart, the ones where they have been together since they were young and have no secrets and have mapped all the intimate places of the other over the years. A made up past in which Chirrut made sure that nothing ever ripped this man apart because he was there, standing in its way, with his flashing teeth and spinning staff and all the strength inside his body.

Baze hums and lifts his hand away, and the sudden lack of warmth, of pressure, makes Chirrut’s skin feel cold and forgotten so he threads them back into the waves of hair, deep, deep as though slipping into sand until the tips brush against Baze’s scalp. Chirrut is reminded of an observation that occurred to him in the bar during those weeks of watching but never speaking, before this turned into something he cannot give a name to, that Baze’s hair makes no sense. As a Guardian, it should have been close cropped, and the time between the fall of the temple and now would not have provided enough time for it to reach this length, and the braids are not Guardian standard either. This is yet another silent story in the wastes of years stretched out between them.

He begins a braid, small, tucked away on its own, that he can whisper his name into and hope that it sings the word into Baze’s brain all day, emblazons him there. And then perhaps when he takes it out later it will tell him what he can never figure out, how Baze feels about him because the man is silent on that as much as he is silent on everything so he never knows, not quite. He wonders, supposes, but never knows, not truly, and the damp, sticking Force on Baze cannot be read well enough to give anything he wants to know away. “Baze,” he begins, glad that he does not have to look at the other right now because one glance into those wet eyes can still everything inside of Chirrut for long moments as he just swims. “Where were you?”

Baze is seated in front of him, leaning into his legs, so it is easy to feel the tension that threads through his limbs, and Chirrut thinks perhaps he should not have gone here, but the door is already open. The Force thick settles a little closer but not dangerously so, not yet. “Chirrut,” he breathes, once again making his name fifteen words, seventeen meanings, six emotions, too much. Chirrut wants nothing as much as more words, more contact, more knowledge. He has never been as good at sparsity as Baze, would rather be given everything and left to sort through it instead of having to play guessing games with himself to ensure that he has sifted all the meaning out of what Baze gives him. 

“Tell me,” he says and then drops his hands, leaving the braid half finished to push the hair away from the back of Baze’s neck, pressing kisses there that leave them both shuddering. “Please tell me.” I know, he thinks as his lips linger over that lovely, formerly hidden skin. I know you weren’t here. You couldn’t have been here. Not when the temple fell, not when the troopers came, not when we fought and bled and fled. There was no way you were here. You would not have allowed the temple to fall before you. I know you now. I have caught you out. Your heart, Baze Malbus, would not have allowed it to fall before you did, and yet you linger here, wavering, warm enough in my hands to still hold some semblance of life, to let me breathe more into you with each day we share. “I need you to tell me.” 

Chirrut often wonders if Baze can hear all the words he cannot say, the ones that worry him too much to reach his mouth so that they stick, half formed, in the pit of his stomach, in the fluttering of his heart, in the catch of his breath, in the whorls of his mind. Do they wander, piecemeal, through the Force to brush across Baze’s temples, to sink into the bounds around his wrists and ankles and throat? Do they burn him like the rest of the world seems to?

Baze’s sighs can sound like the universe stuttering to death around them, the last breath in all of existence, and Chirrut tries to soothe it by pressing more kisses against his skin even though he knows that the contact can be distracting. The way that Baze reacts to kisses and caresses sometimes makes him wonder whether the other man has been touched at all before him, which simply cannot be true because it was Baze who kissed first, and Baze is lovelier than any man has any right to be. Someone surely captured that mouth before. Someone surely traced his muscles with hungry fingers and made him moan and whine and sigh before. Chirrut dislikes the idea, but that does not mean that he can ignore the facts, that someone somewhere somewhen before must have loved Baze Malbus in this way. But how long has it been? Baze makes a pleased noise when he uses just a touch of teeth against his neck, and Chirrut thinks that it must have been quite a while ago. Too long. Precious things should be touched always, reminded always of how adored they are. If allowed, Chirrut would never stop touching him, wringing noises from him like water from a towel.

He bites at Baze’s neck again, slides a hand around the expanse of his chest to settle against his clothed abdomen, warmth radiating through the thin material of the shirt that Baze wears, and it is like a torrent of words is opened, it is like a wave crashing, the rains ripping the sky. One moment, Baze is a man who does not speak, and the next Chirrut thinks that he will never stop himself. 

“I wasn’t here, Chirrut. I didn’t know what would happen. If I had known I would have returned.” His voice cracks and Chirrut answers with a kiss because of course, of course he would have, the only person Baze needs to convince of that is himself. “I was,” he sighs, shivers, halts for a moment and then continues. “I was not the best fighter. The stories. I don’t know about them all, and I don’t want you to tell me because I did not live up to them then and I will not live up to them now. I was good with weapons, and I was good with books. I learned all the languages the masters set me to, and people liked me. I don’t know why. I never understood it.”

You cannot see yourself the way that others do, Chirrut thinks, but will not interpret him to speak because he is worried that if something stops this outpouring, the well will dry up and nothing will show ever again. This is what he wanted to hear, isn’t it? This is what he has been waiting for. Information, explanations, and even failings admitted, but those do not give him any peace because he would rather lift this man up than tear him down any day. You are more than the stories could have said, far more, his lips try to express as they brush over the shell of Baze’s ear.

“I became a Guardian and was set to the task of traveling, preaching, recruiting. I went by myself, bought passage on ships, stayed on planets just talking to people. There was,” he falters and Chirrut’s hand slides up his chest to calm him. “There was no need to keep all the customs of the temple on those worlds, and I had always been sensitive about my ears even if the temple taught not to fall into vain things. I grew my hair out. I always expected to have it shorn when I returned. But.” Baze pauses, and Chirrut considers moving so that he can face him, so that he can look at him and watch him, but he does not because he is concerned about making it harder, about cutting into the stream and destroying it all. 

The pause lingers on for longer than it should, and Chirrut wraps his other arm about Baze’s chest, surrounding him, letting his hair fall back, a dark curtain over his sand colored skin. Chirrut nestles his chin onto Baze’s shoulder and presses his lips against the stubble on his cheek. “It’s okay. You can tell me.”

Baze moves for the first time since he started talking, bringing a hand up to rest over Chirrut’s own. “I felt it. When the temple fell. It rippled, and the Force brought it to me. The blood, and the screaming. There was fire, wasn’t there?”

Chirrut debates for a moment before nodding against Baze’s shoulder.

“I was far from home, and it found me. I could do nothing. Except come back, come home. And I found nothing. I found ruins, and rubble, people who told me that it had burned, who had died. No one knew me as a Guardian with my hair, and I. I hid, Chirrut. I could do nothing. I came home too late. The pride of the temple nowhere even near the temple in the hour of its greatest need. The prize of the temple turned its greatest shame. I sent pilgrims here. I sent initiates. I killed them as surely as the Stormtroopers because I did not know that danger lurked. The Force did not tell me that. And now it punishes me. Everything punishes me, and I do not deserve the Force or the temple.”

Chirrut is about to kiss his skin and argue with him that he is wrong, that this is not his fault, that he could have done nothing to skew the battle for the temple, not really. He might have been struck down, killed, taken before Chirrut could ever even know him. Before he can get the words out, though, Baze has pulled away from his hands and turned to face him, his fingers sliding across Chirrut’s cheeks. 

“I do not deserve you, bright one,” Baze says, both cheeks wet from the tears that Chirrut didn’t hear because, as usual, Baze has been crying silently. “You are every light in every world, and I am too greedy to let you go now because everything is black without you near. And I love you. I think. I hope. I want to. I want to love you, but I have done such a poor job at everything I do that I’m not sure I can manage that. I don’t know what I can even offer you, ruined and wrecked and fallen as I am.”

“It’s not your fault,” he says, voice adamant, hands coming up to encircle Baze’s wrists, which are thick and lovely. “You couldn’t have known.” He stops himself before he mutters what is always at the tip of his tongue, that this is the will of the Force, because he knows that it does not bring this man any comfort, and he can see why. It is startlingly clear, suddenly fully in focus. The Force shackles on Baze that smother him, that will not communicate with Chirrut, that seem detached and dead and adrift, are just dead bits of it. The energy there, that punishes him, that chains him is of his own doing, a piece dragged, cut from the rest of the Force, an echo, a ghost of all the terrible things that sought Baze out across the stars and have made him feel worthless ever since. It is not the Force, not anymore, it is just Baze caught in a loop of his own making.

There is so much he wants to say, there is so much that has been said, and Chirrut isn’t sure where to start first, how to order his responses to make sure that he touches on each topic, but he reaches to try and free Baze first. That seems the most integral, his freedom, the ability to stretch his limbs and do something, anything, the effort to remove the weight of their moon and their temple and the universe from him. And then the rest. Chirrut is himself terrified of the last part, all the talk of love, which he thinks he has felt, too, has felt squirming and rattling since the first days, unexpectedly and quick and maybe, maybe too much. Too much, too fast. While it is very much his style to leap into things head first, he is out of his depth here. All of the things that they studied in the temple, and no one spoke on love, not this love anyway, this heady, rushing, needy thing that makes him want to reach inside of Baze’s chest and drag sparks across his heart, reach into his mind and pull out every darkly veiled thought until he can see himself again, maybe not the Baze Malbus of temple legend but a Baze Malbus who is good. A Baze Malbus who deserves everything soft and lovely in life. 

“It’s not your fault, Baze,” he says again because it seems like something that Baze needs to hear, needs to know, needs to understand. “No one could blame you for that. You did what the temple asked of you.” 

“And left everyone else to defend it.”

“That was how we had been asked to serve it.” 

Baze grows quiet, solemn again, his face implacable and blank as the statues in the desert. The only movement the tracks of tears down his cheeks, and Chirrut lets go of his wrist to brush at the wetness with his thumbs. “Baze,” he starts, and his voice shakes a little because this is a memory he has been avoiding, dancing from, trying not to linger on for long. Always keep moving, always keep smiling, always keep laughing, find a distraction, find a distraction. Chirrut is out of distractions. In order to move forward, he thinks that he needs to step backwards, needs to run headlong into it himself so that he can show it to Baze as well.

And when he speaks again, his voice has taken on a somber tone, one befitting the topic. “We were outnumbered and overrun. One man, even the formidable Baze Malbus, would not have turned that tide. Believe me. I was there. We did what we could to keep the temple, to keep the kyber. The Guardians of the Whills have always been protectors, and we protected what we could as long as we could.” 

Baze is watching him now, his hands rubbing soothingly on Chirrut’s clothed thighs, and his wet eyes study him, gentle, concerned. Chirrut almost closes his eyes because he’s not sure that he can look at Baze and talk about this because it will be too much emotion all at once. His voice shakes when he begins again. “There was fire. There was screaming. There was blood. Your presence would have not have shifted that balance. In the end.” His vision blurs as tears fill his eyes, and he blinks rapidly, trying to control the water, trying to will it away. He is Chirrut Imwe, and his will is steel. He is Chirrut Imwe, and he will not cry.

“Chirrut, it’s okay. Bright one, it’s okay.” Baze is whispering soothingly, his voice quiet and seeming very far away, stretched out into the night, a dream, a phantom, a hallucination. The pressure of his hands, his face under Chirrut’s fingers, though, all of this feels very real.

“We did everything we could, everything in our power, but it wasn’t enough. All is as the Force wills it, but I did not think the Force would will the fall of our temple.” He covers his face with his own hands, unable to look into the dark, wet wells of Baze’s eyes. Chirrut wants to hide from the past, from those moments and how useless they can make him feel. His body, under the robes, is a battlefield of its own, littered with the scars from the wounds he received during the fight, but there are not enough of them to represent everything that has been lost. 

“I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me. I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me,” he begins to chant, to get back to equilibrium, to still the tears threatening to fall, the sobs that he feels creeping up his windpipe trying to escape. He is Chirrut Imwe, and he will not cry. 

There is a hand on the back of his head, and there are lips against his hands. Baze is warm pressed against him. Baze smells like clean laundry and tea and water, always water, and that envelops him as well. Baze does not repeat the mantra with him or chant its partner. No, Baze cups one hand on the back of his head, fingers brushing over his shorn hair, while the other remains steady and solid on his thigh, and kisses at his hands and talks. “You did enough. You did enough, Chirrut. You did what you could. And you can let it out. It’s okay to feel it.”

Chirrut shakes his head behind his hands, but the mantra falls away from his lips. “It’s too much to feel, Baze. It’s too much. What if it washes me away like,” he cuts himself off before he can finish the thought because it would be, what if it washes me away like it has done to you, and that is small and not worthy. 

“Hold on to me. I have failed everyone else, but I am going to try not to fail you. I need to not fail you. Please, Chirrut. Hold on to me.”

And it sounds. It sounds hopeful. It sounds almost bright and buoyant, which makes no sense coming from Baze Malbus, the wrecked, wretched ghost, the man that Chirrut has come to think he needs to save, but who sits here and now offers to try and save him. Meet me in the middle, he thinks again. Meet me in the middle, and we will keep each other from drowning. When the dam bursts and his shoulders hitch and he coughs the sobs out like phlegm gathered in his lungs, Baze settles his arms around him, Baze hunkers over him like a wall, uses his body like a shield, and while his words are almost lost in the sound of Chirrut crying, for the first time over everything that has happened, the messages behind those words soak into his skin and blaze there, spots of comfort as important as every caress. 

Though there is one phrase that he hears no matter what, no matter how softly it is spoken or how loud he is crying. “I love you. I love you, bright one.” It is gentle, and it is kind, and is everything that the masters used to say that the man called Baze Malbus was. It is everything that the man called Baze Malbus is.

 

Chirrut dreams of fire, tongues of it licking up tapestries that hang from the walls of the temple and thick, cloying smoke that makes it hard to move, harder still to breathe because it coats the throat, covers the lungs, weighs him down from the inside out. He dreams of the shouts, in pain, too far for him to reach, too far for him to save, hindered and blinded by smoke and fire and the echoing peels of blasters around them. As he tries to take cover, he trips, catches his foot on a felled statue and tumbles to the ground, rolls to protect himself from hurrying feet in the corridor, not wanting to be trampled and comes face to face with the statue itself. The face is chipped and broken, but he knows who it is instantly: Baze. Only this is not just a statue, it is the man himself finally turned to stone, finally piled high with so much weight that he couldn’t bear it anymore. There are worn tracks on his cheeks from tears, and a hole in the center of him.

Chirrut wakes with a strangled cry, soaked with sweat, his under robes and the sheets both tangled about him, catching at his limbs, making it hard for him to move, but he manages to sweep a hand across the bed and does not find the expected body radiating heat. His throat closes in dismay for a moment, but before he can properly scan the dark recesses of the tiny room, before he can call out Baze’s name, he hears the clearing of a throat and then there is a warm glow as the lantern on the rickety table is turned on. 

In the faint light, Chirrut can see him, and the sight takes his breath away because Baze Malbus, fallen and hollow in places and lost, covered in his own guilty Force energy that he cannot shake off, is the loveliest man and just gets more beautiful with each passing day. Though this might cap all of the other days put together because Baze is dressed in temple robes with his hair tamed and pulled back, away from his face but still down enough to hide his ears, which is a shame because Chirrut adores his ears though he knows Baze is sensitive about them. He looks grand, he looks every bit the Guardian that Chirrut had imagined once upon a time. Yet still sweet and gentle, still the man one would expect to find in the library, talking encouragingly to young initiates about topics, pointing out scrolls and books and datapads to them for their studies. Chirrut thinks he sees a whole other world, a whole other life unfurl in front of him in that moment, and he wants it so much it hurts him because that world is the one that Baze deserves. Not this one, strewn with terror and small, close rooms and wet eyes and only them clinging to each other in the darkness.

It surprises him that Baze still has the robes before he remembers how fiercely Baze clings to everything, how he never lets anything go even when he should. Chirrut does wonder where he could have been hiding them because the rooms are small and storage is limited, but Baze owns next to nothing, either truly lives the life of the devout or simply cannot bring himself to look for items to personalize this life, cannot find a reason to flesh it out, is just waiting to pack up what little he has and disappear into the sands. Maybe he is just waiting for a good time to do that. 

Maybe he doesn’t know how long Chirrut means to stay. They haven’t discussed it. Chirrut has been planning on just lingering until Baze asks him to leave or something happens. And Baze. Baze has said nothing on the subject at all other than the whispered, hushed confirmations of love that occur in the middle of the night when he thinks Chirrut is sleeping, when it’s safe to let the words out. Chirrut feels them, too, a swirl in the pit of his stomach, the racing in his heart, safety in the curve of an arm around his waist, but he hasn’t been able to get to the words, not yet. Part of him is afraid to let them loose and then find that he doesn’t understand them at all, that he has been wrong and brought yet more ruin on Baze without meaning to.

“Are you alright? I heard you cry out,” Baze asks after a moment, eyes on the table in front of him instead of on Chirrut--Chirrut who realizes too soon that he has been staring unabashedly as though this is the first time he has ever seen another person before and maybe it is--a light flush on his cheeks that is even more prominent because of the tint of the lantern. Chirrut wants to crawl across the room and run his tongue across that skin, fist his hands into the robes and convince Baze to let him uncover him, see the miles of flesh that exist beneath it. He has still been shy about that part, though the kisses have gotten longer, the touches more intense.

When he remembers that Baze is waiting for an answer, he clears away the sleep from his voice before speaking. “It was,” he waves a hand in the air, forgetting everything that came before, “just a dream. You look.”

“I haven’t been able to get rid of it,” Baze bursts out, voice almost sharp, and his words are not perfectly practiced for once. There is that hint of an accent again, an undertone to the more prevailing panic spread over it. “I look like a child playing at being the thing. I look like a fool. I am a disgrace.”

Each word is a sharp twist in his heart because none of them are true, and Chirrut’s eyes get big as he listens, as he watches Baze who will still not look at him. Slipping free of the greedy grip of the sheets, Chirrut slides off the bedroll to make his way over to Baze, dropping to his knees in front of him. “I was going to say that you look beautiful.” His fingers stroke the robes, adjusting them quietly, perfecting the tucks and smoothing them out over Baze’s broad chest until his fingers still at a thought. He is lovely like this, but it no longer seems right, Chirrut realizes. This seems more like penance than devotion, more like punishment than joy, and he wonders how much of that rotted, dead Force energy that Baze drags around like chains is connected to things like this, things that he cannot and will not walk away from. 

“I wish I would have known you when your eyes shone to be dressed in these robes, when they suited you,” he says, fingers sliding over Baze’s neck now, which earns him a hum, deep, that he can feel in his hands as much as he hears it. 

“They may have never suited me.” The Force noose tightens, and Chirrut has no control over these bonds, cannot slip his hands between them and Baze’s flesh, cannot reach it, cannot feel it, cannot rip it off and free him. All he can do is watch and try and comfort with words and touches, but sometimes Baze sinks so low he doesn’t know whether he can hear him at all.

Words have gotten easier. For both of them. Chirrut no longer has to pause for long, aching moments with everything stilled on his tongue, and Baze surfaces more. Slowly, slowly, they inch toward something that Chirrut cannot name except that he likes it. More than likes it. Adores it, wants it, needs it. He doesn’t know where this road goes or how hard it will be to walk it, but he would follow it anywhere. 

“Baze,” he starts, but the other stops him with a thumb on his lips. He has learned by now that it is a stilling, a pausing motion for Baze when he wants a moment or a way of shifting gears from one thing to another. 

Baze Malbus is so much more than he appears, so much more than he projects, and Chirrut has sweet talked him into speaking all the languages he learned, reciting poems and texts that Chirrut would have never read, telling him long stories about the worlds he saw traveling for the temple. Scholar guardians, protectors of the temple’s knowledge, were rare things, and Chirrut knows he looks on their crowning star. He understands everything the masters said, knows why they heaped worlds of praise onto the feet of a shy boy whose mind sparkled and spoke of much better things, whose heart was too big to fit the universe in. And the masters hid him away, didn’t they? Sent him to small, inconsequential planets to speak his honeyed words because they knew, they knew anyone who came across him would love him, would love his words and his manner, and how quiet he could be, how empathetic. 

The Force bestows many gifts, Chirrut, he remembers the masters saying, and the greatest of these is the ability to know others. May the Force of others be with you. May you know the Force of others.

I know the Force of you, Chirrut thinks, as the thumb slides over his lips, gentle. 

“What did you dream?” Baze asks, voice flat, words perfectly formed again, betraying nothing of himself.

Chirrut tucks his hands into the layers of cloth on Baze’s upper chest, burrows them through until he can find skin to touch, anchor them together that way and press his knuckles down into Baze’s clavicle, which he wants to worry with his lips and teeth and tongue, wants to see the full expanse of skin and touch it until Baze has forgotten everything but the feel of that, the weight of Chirrut’s love on him, thick, but not thick like fog or thick like sorrow, no, thick like joy, honey colored, viscose like that, thick but flowing into everything, coating, shimmering, not smothering at all. He tries to gauge the amount of water in Baze’s eyes with a glance, attempting to determine how the dream might impact against his rocks, but it’s hard in the middle of the night with the only light the glow of the weak lantern and the way it reflects on Baze’s skin, makes it ruddier and lovelier, soaks into the darkness of his eyes, light dimming in cool, black water. “I dreamed of the fall,” he says, lips moving under the gentle press of Baze’s thumb, and he sees the way that hurt skirts across his features, a wave that laps from one side to the other.

He pauses, wondering, trying to decide if it makes more sense to give voice to it all or leave it there. Which way will wreck Baze more? Which way will heal them? Better out than in. Better not to hold things so tight, wrap them about you so that they can drag you down to the bitter depths of the ocean, he thinks after a moment. Better to speak it. Better to let it go. Finally. Perhaps he can convince Baze of this as well. “There was fire. I couldn’t reach anyone. There was smoke. I couldn’t see. I tripped. And you were there, a statue, turned to stone at last, broken, smashed on the ground, hollow at the center.” 

Baze has dropped his hands, dropped his head so that all Chirrut has to look at is the careful, fastidious way that he has fashioned his hair, the perfection in the strands, which he must have done in the dark while Chirrut slept, done by touch alone. When will Baze Malbus stop surprising him? Never, he hopes. His fingers flutter over the warm skin under the robes, trying to soothe him still. “It was a dream, Baze. You can’t control dreams.”

“Chirrut, I am going to drown you if you stay here.” The ghost words, the ghost voice, the aching broken spirit of Jedha making its slow way down the streets. Chirrut can see him, that man he first glimpsed in the bar, broken, turned inward, disappearing bit by bit into the city, turning the color of the stones and the sand itself, filling himself with all the water that never fell on the streets. He has seen that man, but he has seen everything beneath as well, the smiles and the laughter and the serene way that he fixes tea and the warmth of a calming hand on the back of his neck in the middle of the night, the press of lips, softer than everything else. Baze Malbus is covered in cracks, Baze Malbus is hurt and wrecked, but he is not nothing. He is not hollow. He is golden, but he refuses to let himself shine, worried that the gleam might bring people to him, people that he will disappoint, people that he will fail.

“Now you’re the prettiest fool in the room,” he says, calling back to a previous conversation not long past. Days, weeks mean nothing here it seems. It could be yesterday or it could have been ten years ago. Chirrut feels like he has been beside Baze forever when he stops thinking about all the time they missed out on each other in the temple. Something about being with this man is easier than being with anyone else in the world. Harder too, though, especially at times like this when Baze is slipping, surrendering to all those ties he has bound himself in. 

The words are enough to do what he wants, which is get Baze to look up at him instead of keeping his eyes down like something wounded, something wrong. “You did nothing wrong. You could not have changed what happened. The temple would have fallen with or without you there. And what.” His voice catches in his throat. “What if you had fallen with it?”

“Haven’t I?”

Chirrut leans forward to press his lips against the skin that he has revealed, taking time to suck gently at the flesh until Baze’s breathing has gotten just a little bit ragged, then pulling away just enough to talk, lips still brushing over that skin. “You feel very real to me, very much here.” The robes, things he has always associated with the bright bits of his own life, everything that he has known, everything that he is, are different on Baze, are different for Baze. What brings comfort to Chirrut only serves to help Baze flagellate himself, only makes the Force regret tighten on him, choking him slowly, disappearing him until one day he will fade, shimmer into nothingness beneath Chrirut’s fingers. He can’t let this happen. Not now. Maybe he could have if he had left after that first night in the bar, if he had written that Baze Malbus off, switched his tactic to something else, but he cannot do any of that now. His fate was signed with that kiss, unexpected, infinitely gentle, hinting that there was so much more under the surface even if this was not some story where the hero would come back in a blaze of glory once the right words had been said. No one is going to rise from the darkness to save them. They have to save themselves, they have to save each other.

“The Force is punishing me.”

And that is when Chirrut moves, catches his face in his hands, locks their gazes because no. No, this is not what the Force wants, and he knows it even if Baze cannot get out from the fog to see it. “Baze, you’re carrying your own guilt. You just need to set it down. This,” Chirrut moves his hands as he talks, touching Baze’s wrists and then his neck, “is not the Force, not really. I don’t know what you’ve done, but you've trapped it. You’ve trapped a moment of it,” a harsh, stuttering, darkling moment, the moment that crawled to him across the expanse of space to let him know about the fall of the temple, “and bound it to you.” Even Chirrut, who is strong in the Force, good at sensing it and communicating with it and knowing it in things, cannot tell how Baze has done this thing, what could have made it happen other than Baze’s clenching, fisted hands, and his own sense that the weight of the universe is somehow his to lift. If anyone could pause a moment, steal the burden of it and fix it to their own body, it would be him.

Getting him to let it go, getting him to set it down, that is the trick, and Chirrut hopes it is not beyond his ability.

Baze is quiet, retreated, settled back into himself, warm at the points of contact between them but distant as though across the street instead of being right there with Chirrut’s fingers against his skin, and this is his least favorite part of this man he loves, how he can hide, sequester himself away, disappear into the swirls of the things that trouble him. All Chirrut can do is hold his hands out, fingers reaching into the blackness, shouting into the void for Baze to meet him halfway, just halfway, just to make an effort. They can carry each other. They can share their strength. But he cannot bodily move Baze out of his own darkness. It will never work. Chirrut is not that strong, and he thinks Baze would just sink again anyway. Unless he wants it too. Unless he makes it work.

“Come here.” Chirrut is insistent, pulling at Baze’s wrist until the man does what he wants, arranges himself the way that he wants. They are forehead to forehead, knee to knee, in a position of prayer, though Chirrut has laced his hands tightly with Baze’s, which is abnormal, and he can feel the tension there, can feel how scared Baze is to go anywhere near the Force. He cannot blame him because, in his mind, the Force has become the source of all pain for months now. “Baze, do you trust me?” It’s hard to look at each other properly like this, but he focuses on the wet eyes, full of tears and fear and something else, resigned and small in the darkness, a light wavering, something almost hopeful. That, then, that is the thing he needs to reach.

At first Baze only nods, but Chirrut presses his hands because he needs words, he needs confirmation, and the man understands. “Yes, bright one. With my life.”

It should be too much, but Chirrut finds that it isn’t. It doesn’t terrify him. It only reaffirms the things that Baze has said in the night when he thinks that he can’t hear, the confessions of love, whispers of poetry gleaned from all those books that were felled with the destruction of the temple, the ones that Chirrut never found the time to read because he thought they were pretty, silly things, less useful than sparring and training. Baze, he thinks, would have been a pretty, silly thing as an initiate, big ears and sad smiles and shy, good with weapons but not at sparring, not wanting to hit people, everyone liking him, and his heart bigger than everything else. 

“I love you,” he breathes, and the words are small, they unfurl like leaves in spring, slowly, tiny and green. It is the first time he has said it aloud, and Baze’s eyes are so big that Chirrut thinks entire galaxies drift there. He kisses him, quick, soft. “I love you, and we are winning this one together, Baze.”

Baze’s hands in his tighten, the small squeeze saying so much, imparting so much, gratitude and love as much as the fear, as much as the worry. One day, Chirrut promises himself, he will chase everything else out of that grasp until there is only love in every held hand. Today, though, today this is enough. It is somewhere to start.

“Close your eyes,” Chirrut says, and Baze follows, though his breathing is not controlled and regular the way that it should be, and Chirrut knows his heart is also hammering. “Breathe with me.” These are all things that Baze knows. These are all things that would have been second nature in the temple, but the temple is gone and the moment of its death is the only thing that seems to live around Baze now. It is not hard to imagine why he would have trouble surrendering to that. “This might hurt, but I need you to chant with me.” Chirrut doesn’t know what the triggers are, hasn’t been able to suss them out from the weeks spent watching the Force cloud. It is best to prepare Baze for things.

“I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me,” he says, pauses to see if Baze will pick it up, but the other does not seem to have found his voice yet. Chirrut is concerned but will not open his eyes, will not break the circuit unless he has to. “I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me.” Repeat, pause. Repeat, pause. 

Eventually, Baze comes in. “The Force is with me. I am one with the Force.” And then it is just a matter of letting go together.

Slowly, they drift. Slowly, they settle. And Chirrut can feel Baze there, trembling, waiting for the shoe to drop, prepared for something terrible to happen. Nothing does. Chirrut guides them, and the Force is a heavy blanket around them, thick and plush and warm. Nothing hurts. Nothing digs daggers into them, nothing is there to yell or accuse. If anything the Force seems to pool more around Baze than anything, soothing, comforting, easing. Any conversation, any whispers of intention are made to Baze and Baze alone, but Chirrut thinks he can guess at what is happening there. Baze will apologize, Baze will beg for forgiveness, and the Force will show him that he was never to blame at all. It is a long dip, a long time spent under, hours, hours that stretch and pull but do not exhaust. The exchange of energy seems to be the Force giving back what had been refused for so long while Baze lived within the shackles of his own loop. 

Chirrut’s hands never waver and neither does his concentration, wrapped, stretched, looped like ropes or vines or strings around them both. He is never going to let go now. If something breaks, he will build it again. He will weave his own strings from hair or silk or love or the Force energy around them. Perhaps he should have learned to weave in the temple, but he didn’t know then what he knows now, that one day it would be beneficial for him to learn to repair things instead of fighting them, instead of taunting them, teasing them, flashing his teeth and his laugh. And now he knows but has not the skills. So he will find them. One at a time. He will pick them up from the ground or from others, from Baze, not just the stories told but also who he is, which is so much more than any story could contain. 

He thinks he hears it when the bonds loosen and fall, an audible click, but he cannot say for sure. It might be just another thing supplied by his mind, by the overactive imagination that the masters used to tell him would get him in trouble one day if he did not learn to reel it in, to tame it. It has been years, but Chirrut still does feel tamed, never wants to, so he does imagine that he can hear, that he can feel it as each loop that Baze has shackled himself with melts, fades, is given up and soaked back into the Force where it came from, healed. A moment in time that can be given up. They will never forget it. That is not the point, but the Force moves. It is a living thing. Small moments are not meant to be carried like stones about the neck. All is as the Force wills it, and the Force is always moving. Stilling it, capturing it, causes problems. Each time he thinks he hears the click, his heart pulses in joy that flares and flickers between them. He hopes that Baze can recognize it for what it is as they linger, as they float in this place without words, between words, more than words could ever say.

When they rise from the depths of it, Baze is shaking, weary, pushed to his limit and beyond. It must be hard, Chirrut thinks, to be immersed back into the Force after such a long separation from the real thing, tangled only in the shadow of it, the worst moment of it. Opening eyes to it again after all of that must be like, well, like falling in love for the first time, nothing and then everything at once. After a gentle squeeze, Chirrut releases his hands from Baze’s fingers, so that he can stroke them over the other man’s cheeks and into his hair, the calming, soothing gestures that he has learned. He kisses his forehead and watches his eyes, which are better, clearer, less full of murky water and that thing in the darkness, the small flickering light seems to have come closer. There, he thinks. There is a start.

“You’re okay. It’s okay,” he murmurs, fingers running lightly over the shell of Baze’s left ear once he has located in, hidden as it is in the thick fall of his waves. It takes him a moment to get the next bit out because it seems heavy and ponderous, and he is afraid of letting anything like that out, especially right now, worried that Baze is raw and will be easily overwhelmed, but he also needs to say it. For himself. “We’re okay.” We. A we. Chirrut has never been part of we in the way that he thinks it encompasses himself and Baze. It is not the we of brothers, of those from the temple, of Guardians. It is a heavier and holier we that is still made up of all of that because they can never separate themselves from what came before, it will always be an integral part of the makeup of what this is, of what they are and will be.

Will be. That is what Chirrut really wants to know. With Baze’s face in his hands, with Baze’s eyes turning bright and glittery, with Baze’s hands settled like warm massage stones over his clothed thighs but calling so much attention there anyway even with the layers between them, Chirrut wants to know what the future will be. It is a greedy thought. All will be as the Force wills it, after all, but he wants to know if it wills them together. If it does not, then he is prepared to fight it, to go down tooth and nail, scrabbling with the fabric of the universe itself until it gives him what he wants. 

“We, bright one?” Baze asks, and his voice is lower than usual, a harsh, trapped noise, thick with emotions, and there have been so many of those that Chirrut is not sure which one might be causing that reaction, but the sound of it is enough to send a shiver up his spine and make him press his lips together and try very hard to be good, to not kiss or run his fingers to places that Baze has called off limits even though all he wants to do is explore all of him.

I will wait for you forever, he thinks, but I do wish you wouldn’t make me.

“Yes, we,” he agrees, and then sucks in a breath as Baze’s fingers find flesh, slipping beneath the loose fabric of his under robes to trace along his legs. Then it occurs to him that he is making an assumption because this is nothing they have talked about. Chirrut has been pulled into his orbit and assumed it was quite all right to fashion a home there without ever asking if this is okay, if this is wanted. “If you want. If you want it, there is a we.” It’s hard to keep him eyes open, hard to keep talking when Baze’s nails are making slow circles on his thighs, but he manages. “I hope there’s a we. I would hate to cancel the linen order.” He attempts levity, but it fails, falls, sounds like nothing so much as a gasp pulled too soon from his throat, but he hasn’t known Baze to tease like this, hasn’t prepared himself for it.

“There is a we as long as you want me,” Baze says, and Chirrut isn’t sure whether to be sad or relieved when his hands stop their slow torture to pull him forward, into the broad expanse of his lap. Chirrut takes the opportunity to undo the various twists and knots of Baze’s robes until he can push them open, get his first glimpse at Baze’s chest, which is broad, a shade slightly paler than his arms because of the lack of exposure to sun, and smooth, the flesh unmarred by the scars he would have expected given the way that the masters talked. 

It does not surprise him as much now, now that he knows the truth under all those stories, the fact that Baze was a scholar guardian, the fact that he was not there when the temple fell. Oh, there are scars, but they are light, little things, barely more than forgotten worries that he presses under his fingertips. Nothing like the long lines of scar tissue that drag themselves over the planes of his own body, speak of a blaster bolt that got too close or a knife or the fact that, once, he was not fast enough and another time he misjudged a jump or just got reckless about doing something, diving headfirst into something. Baze, on the other hand, has skin that, in comparison, looks like no one has ever touched it in anger. Chirrut bends to press a kiss against his sternum, and is rewarded with a noise that radiates through Baze’s entire body, vibrates and nestles itself into his own skin. “I want you,” he says, repeats it with every kiss he presses, working his slow way up Baze’s chest and neck until they are eye to eye. “I want you, Baze Malbus. I love you.”

“Even though I am nothing like the stories?” Baze asks, and the wet in his eyes now is different, hopeful, and the reflection of himself that Chirrut sees there is loved and loving and kind. 

“There are not enough words in the universe to properly encapsulate you.” Chirrut means it. With everything he is, he means it. All of the stories have fallen flat. All of the legends have been wrong. No words will capture this man. Even if he started today, he would never be able to finish, never be able to fashion a story good enough to explain everything about him, what he is and how he makes him feel, how he feels under his fingers and his lips, the worlds trapped in his eyes and the languages on his tongue, the ten thousand poems that have soaked into the whorls of his fingerprints. Baze Malbus is a man who would make a good foundation, would be a good pillar. He is strong, and he is devoted. He would hold the weight of the world on himself without even being asked. There is kindness in every fiber of him, and he is gentle whether cupping a hand on the back of a head or kissing in an alley besides a bar. He is dusty reds and trilling golds and the dark dark brown of his eyes and the almost black of his hair. He is a grouping of braids woven steadily by hands that are slightly smaller than they should be but still large enough to cradle everything that is fragile and delicate. He is everything on the list the masters gave him, the one that Chirrut memorized until the point that it became burned onto the back of his eyelids to haunt him when he tried to sleep, but he is so much more than that. Baze Malbus is all of these things, all of these great things, and yet he looks at him as though he is glowing, golden, special, unlike anything else in the universe.

This is what falling in love is, then, Chirrut thinks, and he lets go. Fully. Completely. Utterly. The way that he thinks Baze did that moment in the alley, trusting something, trusting his great lovely constantly bleeding heart. What must it be like to feel like that, Chirrut wonders, to feel everything at once?

Baze cups his face with one of those hands, dry but too soft, soft like afternoons spent in a library, soft like evenings spent making tea, soft like a boy who probably wept the first time he read the poems that he can pull from the air these days to strew at Chirrut’s feet. “You are all the stars in the sky, all the light in the universe,” he whispers, and Chirrut’s heart hammers. 

I know you, he thinks. I will always know you now, Baze Malbus. 

And then Baze kisses him, and that is the only thing that he can focus on, the taste and feel of everything that Baze is within his reach with no thick Force fog to drown him, no ghost voice calling out quiet, broken things into the night. It is just them. Their sighs and moans and breathy repeated declarations of love, new and yearning and bright, and there is nothing to hide from each other any more.


End file.
